theories is this; I am certainly very interested in them. I have been accused of being a conspiracy theorist because of my association with HEAL in the 90s and because of my present association with the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship (we think that Edward de very was the ‘real’ Shakespeare). I do not regret my association with HEAL. We were called ‘AIDS deniers’ but we never denied that people were dying of something -- especially gay men -- nor did we deny that it was tragic. The origin of HEAL is homeopathy, a general skepticism towards the medical establishment and Big Pharma. Well pharmaceutical drugs are now on the stock market, and commercials urge us to take all sorts of drugs every day; the side effects are broadcast in a tiny voice while people frolic in carefree and sometimes sexual ways. There is the eminent Dr. Fauci. (He is eminent but very short, barely five foot seven; no doubt he has a Napoleonic complex, and one doesn’t want to mess with a short man who resents his shortness, I've had sex with many such men — and they are often good in bed because they are perpetually angry — but that doesn’t make them good people.) Dr. Fauci poses as a modest and unassuming fellow, but he killed thousands of gay men by recommending the lethal drug AZT, and, also, after that, insisting that everyone ‘hit hard’ with the equally lethal early AIDS cocktails. Finally, he promised a vaccine that never materialized. On top of that I still don’t believe that AIDs is just ‘a virus’ as there are lots of unpromiscuous people who got it (and no they are not hemophiliacs, or Haitian) and more than that, why do I know so many gay men who survived it, without drugs, basically asymptomatic? I’m not denying that the AIDS cocktails eventually became miracle drugs that did cause many of my friends to walk off their deathbeds like Lazarus -- but nobody really knows why they work, and all this happened after a nightmarish mass agony that makes COVI-19 look like a cakewalk. So I am still skeptical of what the ‘good doctor’ says, and you should be too. Just because doctors are arrogant and wear white coats doesn’t mean they are not sometimes bad people. (Like cops.) When it comes to Shakespeare, well I won’t go into all that now, but it’s evident to any idiot whose whole livelihood is not attached to the lie of ‘The Stratford Man,’ that: Edward de Vere was Shakespeare. Why does it matter? Because we like to think that the greatest writer in the western world was just a good little businessman — like the rest of us — who might have cheated on his wife (also like most of us) and who never wrote a play about himself or his own feelings. But in fact Shakespeare was a man -- like any other, yes -- but very well educated -- who did reveal himself in his work. He was not a nice little family man with a few flaws like most normal people, but perhaps a murderer, a bisexual — and well, a lot of other much-disapproved-of-things. I won’t go into it all here. The authorship question speaks to the notion that artists are not necessarily good people, and if you only want to read or view art by ‘good people’ you will not have much to read or watch or look at, because most people are very flawed, and yes, very flawed people do often make great art. Now when it comes to COVID-19 I am somewhat of a conspiracy theorist. It doesn’t help that I’ve been hanging out lately with someone who is a Q-Anon believer and uses duckduckgo as his search engine, and who last time I saw him was going on about The Tavistock Institute. He is also an anti-masker. And yes, I do like this guy, believe it or not — and he is very smart, but I certainly don’t agree with him about everything. I would say that generally speaking there is some truth to conspiracy theories -- even if their only truth is that they are skeptical of foundationalist assumptions. All that means in plain English is that they speak against ‘common sense’ and push us all to think outside the box. In terms of COVID-19 don’t get me started, I think we have destroyed our economy and our mental health because — why? Because very old people are dying. But I don’t put it down to a conspiracy theory; I think rather it is a perfect storm of three elements: victim politics, digital technology, and the ‘health craze’ — all not conspiring together, but somewhat accidentally crashing into each other, the result being the present nightmare. It’s nobody's fault, it’s just that now we are obsessed with ‘hurt’ and ‘being hurt’ and with recognising the ‘hurt of others;' virtue signalling with fake altruism has become the order of the day (don’t think about yourself, think about others, yes good luck with that, Christ tried it and it frankly didn’t work too well….). And when it comes to the digital world, it’s a drug, in fact precisely the drug described in Brave New World — Soma — it makes us feel good with no physical side effects -- only mental ones -- i.e. we become solipsistic, lonely, and intolerant of the opinions of others. And finally the ‘health craze’ which says that it’s the quantity of life that matters — i.e. how long you live — not how much fun you have. You put all this into a bowl and mix it up and you’ve got: ‘Oh no! Grandma’s dying and I feel for her so much — even though I put her in that home years ago and longed to forget her — now I want everyone to know of my intense concern and love for her — and yes, I am willing to give up my social life --which was stressful anyway -- and just sit in front of my computer all day, masturbate, and watch TikTok (it’s interactive!) just to save her life.’ So in protest, last night I went out and had sex with a very sweet sad man who lives in St. James Town. He was paying God knows how much rent for a tiny room, living with someone he described as ‘an alcoholic computer Geek.’ Our sex was almost actual, real sex — though it involved quite a lot of drugs on his part. However, it was the best we could do. The sexiest part was that I wasn’t allowed to make noise because it might wake up his crazy roommate. The depressing part was that he attributed his lifelong affection for s/m to being molested as a child. (It used to be called ‘kink,’ now it of course, is related — like everything — to trauma.) Let’s not blame anyone for s/m, or for anything; we are only victims of our collective stupidity — always will be — because people are, basically (I don’t know how to tell you this!) stupid. All I can really recommend is that we all try and be smarter; whatever that means.
